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Sign of the times: Could the Bowery change any faster? With so many new condominiums and the forthcoming New Museum a few doors down, the colossal Avalon Chrystie apartment complex at East Houston Street and Bowery finally gains its anchor tenant at month's end, Whole Foods. For over two years, the Lower East Side and various websites have awaited this mammoth 66,000-square-foot supermarket, Whole Foods' largest New York City store that will further shake up the ossified grocery business in Manhattan. As the illuminated signs are being affixed today, it seems the March 29th opening might really come on time.
Whole Foods only recently announced plans to swallow its largest competitor, Wild Oats. Although this had the immediate effect of temporarily shoring up its sagging stock price, which reached a high of $74/share about 11 months ago, the price presently hovers slightly above its year-low of $42.13/share. While Whole Foods has a history of eating its competitors—Fresh Fields comes to mind—its local practices have never been without controversy. For example, when the Austin-based chain had less than 10 stores, it moved to the former Berkeley Co-Op in 1990, where it was perceived as anti-union and struck for 18 months. At the time, it was alleged "the store paid its workers from $1 to $5 less per hour than other supermarkets paid comparable employees and that Whole Foods had practiced discriminatory hiring in terms of age and race." However, those charges obviously did not stick over the years, because the workforce in that store is one of its most diverse. I visited its newest store over the weekend, in Portland, Maine. While Maine remains the whitest state in America, even this store has a diverse staff, and I also noted two large Somali families perusing the terrific selection of bulk grains and spices. Locals had wondered why Whole Foods plopped down its 46,000-square-foot store so close to Wild Oats: Whole Foods bought Whole Grocer in Portland, and situated its recently-vacated temporary store right next to Wild Oats. As the Associated Press reported last year, "the acquisition of the Whole Grocer allows it to get into the Portland market before it even breaks ground for a new store and eliminate an established, locally owned competitor at the same time." Seems the merger might moot the issue that so bitterly divided Portland—not least as the Whole Foods store was packed when I visited on Saturday—thus rendering at least this Wild Oats redundant merely through acquiring the company. Moreover, the Portland store features a chocolate bar and a gelato bar, and is the only Whole Foods store selling lobsters—in a ludicrously "humane" tank. Most Mainers think the lobster debate is absurd, given that Whole Foods sells all sorts of cuts of various animals that hardly have more room to move around in their pens than your average lobster in a tank. While Whole Foods does sell quite a bit of organic food and meat that is "naturally raised" (an ambiguous term with little real meaning), most organic food sold by large grocers in this country is barely certified—and the demand for organic products at superstores such as Wal-Mart means even less certification will take place in the future.
Curiously, Whole Foods' expansion has meant sourcing more organic products overseas. For example, organic garlic from China. Does this mean QAI (Quality Assurance International) sends its inspectors over to China to observe every field where garlic is grown? Not at all. Does it mean doing business with China is in line with its declared mission? Not at all. Does buying organic products that are shipped halfway across the world really jibe with traditional values of buying organic? Not at all. Has Whole Foods lost its mission? Yes and no. On the one hand, Whole Foods revolutionized the stagnant supermarket business in New York, just as Fresh Fields did in the morbid grocery business of Washington, DC. Many of Whole Foods' devoted New York customers swear they never shop at Gristede's or Food Emporium any longer—and a recent visit to a Gristede's on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village confirms why: traditional New York supermarkets tend to rely heavily on garish fluorescent lighting, ugly linoleum, and surly staff, and the quality of some meats and produce ranges from questionable to vile. On the one hand, Whole Foods offers some of the best prices in New York City on high-end dairy products and occasional specials on top-quality organic products. On the other, it has rightly earned the moniker "whole paycheck" by selling ordinary fruits and vegetables trucked in from the West Coast at top prices—a mere 200 yards away from the terrific local Greenmarket produce sold at Union Square. In any event, staff at Whole Foods always seem so motivated in contrast to their counterparts at other Manhattan chains, bolstered no doubt by stock options, decent health care benefits, the opportunities for promotion within the company, and its higher hourly salaries. While the first outpost in Manhattan, the Chelsea store on Seventh Avenue at West 24th Street, did experience a few protests in its initial months, it was a typically New York situation: a temp agency had hired illegal immigrants who spoke little English to hand out leaflets charging Whole Foods with unfair business practices by not hiring union meatcutters.
Back to the good old Lower East Side, to the infamous Bowery, former haunt of drunks, derelicts, William S. Burroughs, and music halls. The musical "A Trip to Chinatown" (1892) introduced those famous lyrics about the infamous Bowery:
The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry!
They say such things,
And they do strange things
On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
I'll never go there anymore!
The Bowery Whole Foods unfortunately will not open with a wine store, given the ridiculous controversy the departed Pataki administration ignited over the Columbus Circle location's former wine store, which the state deemed unacceptable due to its lack of a separate street entrance. Only a bureaucrat could love New York's arcane liquor laws—rendering it physically impossible to install an entrance to a underground wine store-within-a-store. Since Trader Joe's flagship Manhattan store solved the problem by placing a wine store next to its 14th Street market (at tremendous additional cost to the company), Whole Foods intends to place its wine store entrance on Chrystie Street. Just as Trader Joe's offers more reasonable prices on the low-end range of California wines sold in New York stores, we expect Whole Foods' buying power will additionally reduce inflated prices on selected California wines. Want even lower prices? Ask the Spitzer administration to break the stranglehold the wine distributors have on wine prices in New York State by calling (212) 961-8378 or send an email to: Enforcement@abc.state.ny.us . You might also contact the district manager of Community Board 3, Susan Stetzer, who testified at the State Liquor Authority hearings against Whole Foods. Some locals wonder if nearby liquor merchants paid her off to oppose Whole Foods' wine store, though that seems to be pure innuendo.
In any event, this Whole Foods will include the Rustica Minardi, "our interpretation of an Italian osteria," and the Fromagerie, with the store's very own cheese aging room, plus a Fresh & Wild salad area. This Whole Foods is also proud to work with "local nonprofits" including the YMCA, whose gym one level below the market was temporarily closed last year while the much-delayed store rejiggered its complicated plumbing—the pipes of which are very much visible from the treadmills of the gym. The insufferable construction delays here seem to mirror the situation throughout Manhattan—construction throughout Manhattan has reached a feverish pitch—and all along the Bowery, which stretches from Chinatown's Chatham Square to East Fourth Street in the East Village. Until now, the only markets of any size on the Bowery proper were clustered around Grand Street, two of which have disappeared, leaving Tan Tin Hung next door to the former Bar Mart as well as minor contenders astride and downwind of the much-defaced former Bowery Savings Bank. Lighting and furniture stores remain, but nightclubs and restaurants are the future amidst the condominums. And while it was alleged mastermind Rudy Giuliani rid the Bowery forever of squeegee men, it did not go unnoticed last August that one clever fellow with a squeegee at the intersection of Bowery and Delancey Street did decent business in windshield washing. (Rudy of course has bigger problems these days, so we can gloss over this.)
In conclusion, while there is no doubt the Lower East Side and East Village definitely will profit from hundreds of new jobs and what will likely become Manhattan's premier supermarket, it remains to be seen how affordable the market will be for its residents, many of whom (particularly south of Houston Street and East of the Bowery) are low income. We predict serial snacking will be a problem here as at other stores, whereby shoppers pick up a scone, croissant or muffin as they enter and manage to scarf the entire thing down before reaching the checkout lines. But don't bother shoplifting—undercover security as well as video cameras will likely reduce pilferage at the salad bar here as well. (And yes, we've heard the infamous tale from employees about a repeat offender who was caught with entire beef tenderloins in his overcoat.) Meanwhile, don't ask the residents of Avalon Chrystie—which is rumored to still have plumbing problems—if the rumbling of delivery trucks disturbs their sleep. The intersection of East Houston and Chrystie Streets was already one of Manhattan's noisiest.
Tags:
bowery, east village, gristedes, houston street, lower east side, portland, whole foods
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Posted on 3/12/2007
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